By Alison Roh Park
Spoiler alert: This review reveals important details from the storyline. Listen to DJ Ming’s interview with Bboy Wicket on City Beef, Wednesday nights at 8pm on KOOP.org.
Directed by Lily Plotkin and produced by Ryan Hormel, WICKET is a tale of how a legendary Bay Area breakdancer Gabriel “Wicket” Jaocinto found his way to himself. The film is half love letter to a golden era of hip hop and the youth culture that originated it, and half testament to the leap of faith Wicket took as one of the first bboys to come out as gay on his 41st birthday.
The friends watched a VHS tape of the 1984 movie Beat Street and began practicing daily. Wicket was already a product of the Bay Area Filipino community that had already produced the mobile turntable crews of the 1970s and hip hop greats like Qbert, Mix Master Mike, and Apollo. He quickly made a name for himself among his peers, roaming the streets of San Francisco after school with his helmet in hand to practice what would become his signature move—the headspin. At the Embarcadero Center one afternoon, young Wicket caught the eye of 80s bboy Aki Starr, and in an early milestone, he was recruited into The Renegade Rockers.
The film cuts present-day interviews with archival footage of the historic breakdancing battles that created the local-to-global community that launched this element of hip hop into the Olympics arena. After one such historic battle, Wicket received a phone call that changed the trajectory of his life from his competitor, Mr. Wiggles from the famous Rock Steady Crew.
Barely of voting age, Wicket performed in Vegas for a year with the legendary crew as part of the production Madhattan. Wicket continued to learn and hone his craft beyond the headspin under the tutelage of Flo Master, who attributes his own ethos to his early training with Rock Steady Crew in New York City. After the production wrapped, it was critical that Wicket reestablish himself as a legitimate bboy, and he did just that by winning a battle without his signature headspin, simply using fundamentals like precision footwork.
The documentary includes elegant hat tips to major players of the 1990s Bay Area breakdancing community and pays tribute where it is due across space and time. Wicket’s conversations with Bay Area icon, Bgirl Nancy “Asia One” Yu, are featured prominently. Asia One co-created and contributed to the infrastructure and local-to-global networks that brought breaking into the Olympic arena.
About halfway through the film, in a conversation between these two friends about Wicket’s late 90s post-Vegas comeback, they talk about how his performance still evoked critiques about authenticity, including the sentiment that “You aren’t being true, [when it] isn’t your foundation.” The film makes a key pivot at this moment, rewinding to a grainy self-recording of young Wicket, alone in the mirror of a dance studio.
“I had all types of bags and clothes on top of me still,” Wicket says, recounting the period when his relationship his partner in Austin was blooming, but he had still not come out to his friend and mentor Flo Master. “I just need to f-cking be me…. F-ck you waiting for?” Wicket came out via music, with a beat made for his 41st birthday, released on social media.
“I been lying this whole time
Tired of being someone else
Now it’s time to just be me…
I’m okay to say that I’m gay
F-ck it I don’t care, you been knowing.”
Wicket was met with resounding support, and the precedent empowered other breakers to follow suit. In one interview, Wicket explains that after coming out he had a newfound energy, and with it he decided to compete for the first time after coming out in the 40 and up category of the 2019 Freestyle Session World Final. After a close battle with Bboy Arton, Wicket is awarded the win in an emotional finale to the film.
To watch Wicket’s freestyle is to understand that while it is an Olympic category today, breakdancing is art, and art is culture. The battle is an emotional culmination of the film that takes it back to what hip hop fundamentally means to so many—breakdancing ultimately gives countless bboys and bgirls the confidence to represent themselves, unapologetically.
WICKET recently premiered in Austin at the Big Queer Weekend and Danzversity this fall. Visit wicketdocumentary.com for more information. If you’re in the Austin area, check out Break Expectation’s breakdancing competition, Let Me Get Down Vol. 1 on Nov 6 and Nov 7. Learn more at www.breakexpectations.org.